The dubious science of the climate crusaders.
by William Happer (from First Things)
William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.
I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.
Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate atmospheric CO2 as a “pollutant.” According to my Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, to pollute is “to make or render unclean, to defile, to desecrate, to profane.” By breathing are we rendering the air unclean, defiling or desecrating it? Efforts are underway to remedy the old-fashioned, restrictive definition of pollution. The current Wikipedia entry on air pollution, for example, now asserts that pollution includes: “carbon dioxide (CO2)—a colorless, odorless, non-toxic greenhouse gas associated with ocean acidification, emitted from sources such as combustion, cement production, and respiration.”
As far as green plants are concerned, CO2 is not a pollutant, but part of their daily bread—like water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other essential elements. Most green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand ppm, many times higher than now. Plants grow better and have better flowers and fruit at higher levels. Commercial greenhouse operators recognize this when they artificially increase the concentrations inside their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm.
Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom King Edward VIII renounced the British throne, supposedly said, “A woman can’t be too rich or too thin.” But in reality, you can get too much or too little of a good thing. Whether we should be glad or worried about increasing levels of CO2 depends on quantitative numbers, not just qualitative considerations.
How close is the current atmosphere to the upper or lower limit for CO2? Did we have just the right concentration at the preindustrial level of 270 ppm? Reading breathless media reports about CO2 “pollution” and about minimizing our carbon footprints, one might think that the earth cannot have too little CO2, as Simpson thought one couldn’t be too thin—a view which was also overstated, as we have seen from the sad effects of anorexia in so many young women. Various geo-engineering schemes are being discussed for scrubbing CO2 from the air and cleansing the atmosphere of the “pollutant.” There is no lower limit for human beings, but there is for human life. We would be perfectly healthy in a world with little or no atmospheric CO2—except that we would have nothing to eat and a few other minor inconveniences, because most plants stop growing if the levels drop much below 150 ppm. If we want to continue to be fed and clothed by the products of green plants, we can have too little CO2.
The minimum acceptable value for plants is not that much below the 270 ppm preindustrial value. It is possible that this is not enough, that we are better off with our current level, and would be better off with more still. There is evidence that California orange groves are about 30 percent more productive today than they were 150 years ago because of the increase of atmospheric CO2.
Although human beings and many other animals would do well with no CO2 at all in the air, there is an upper limit that we can tolerate. Inhaling air with a concentration of a few percent, similar to the concentration of the air we exhale, hinders the diffusional exchange of CO2 between the blood and gas in the lung. Both the United States Navy (for submariners) and nasa (for astronauts) have performed extensive studies of human tolerance to CO2. As a result of these studies, the Navy recommends an upper limit of about 8000 ppm for cruises of ninety days, and nasa recommends an upper limit of 5000 ppm for missions of one thousand days, both assuming a total pressure of one atmosphere. Higher levels are acceptable for missions of only a few days.
We conclude that atmospheric CO2 levels should be above 150 ppm to avoid harming green plants and below about 5000 ppm to avoid harming people. That is a very wide range, and our atmosphere is much closer to the lower end than to the upper end. The current rate of burning fossil fuels adds about 2 ppm per year to the atmosphere, so that getting from the current level to 1000 ppm would take about 300 years—and 1000 ppm is still less than what most plants would prefer, and much less than either the nasa or the Navy limit for human beings.
Yet there are strident calls for immediately stopping further increases in CO2 levels and reducing the current level. As we have discussed, animals would not even notice a doubling of CO2 and plants would love it. The supposed reason for limiting it is to stop global warming—or, since the predicted warming has failed to be nearly as large as computer models forecast, to stop climate change. Climate change itself has been embarrassingly uneventful, so another rationale for reducing CO2 is now promoted: to stop the hypothetical increase of extreme climate events like hurricanes or tornados. But this does not necessarily follow. The frequency of extreme events has either not changed or has decreased in the 150 years that CO2 levels have increased from 270 to 390 ppm.
Let me turn to some of the problems the non-pollutant CO2 is supposed to cause. More CO2 is supposed to cause flooded cities, parched agriculture, tropical diseases in Alaska, etc., and even an epidemic of kidney stones. It does indeed cause some warming of our planet, and we should thank Providence for that, because without the greenhouse warming of CO2 and its more potent partners, water vapor and clouds, the earth would be too cold to sustain its current abundance of life.
Other things being equal, more CO2 will cause more warming. The question is how much warming, and whether the increased CO2 and the warming it causes will be good or bad for the planet.
The argument starts something like this. CO2 levels have increased from about 280 ppm to 390 ppm over the past 150 years or so, and the earth has warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius during that time. Therefore the warming is due to CO2. But correlation is not causation. Roosters crow every morning at sunrise, but that does not mean the rooster caused the sun to rise. The sun will still rise on Monday if you decide to have the rooster for Sunday dinner.
There have been many warmings and coolings in the past when the CO2 levels did not change. A well-known example is the medieval warming, about the year 1000, when the Vikings settled Greenland (when it was green) and wine was exported from England. This warm period was followed by the “little ice age” when the Thames would frequently freeze over during the winter. There is no evidence for significant increase of CO2 in the medieval warm period, nor for a significant decrease at the time of the subsequent little ice age. Documented famines with millions of deaths occurred during the little ice age because the cold weather killed the crops. Since the end of the little ice age, the earth has been warming in fits and starts, and humanity’s quality of life has improved accordingly.
A rare case of good correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is provided by ice-core records of the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods of the last million years of so. But these records show that changes in temperature preceded changes in CO2 levels, so that the levels were an effect of temperature changes. This was probably due to outgassing of CO2 from the warming oceans and the reverse effect when they cooled.
The most recent continental ice sheets began to melt some twenty thousand years ago. During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago, the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed by as much as 10 degrees Celsius in fifty years.
The earth’s climate has always been changing. Our present global warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history, and it is probably benefiting the biosphere. Indeed, there is very little correlation between the estimates of CO2 and of the earth’s temperature over the past 550 million years (the “Phanerozoic” period). The message is clear that several factors must influence the earth’s temperature, and that while CO2 is one of these factors, it is seldom the dominant one. The other factors are not well understood. Plausible candidates are spontaneous variations of the complicated fluid flow patterns in the oceans and atmosphere of the earth—perhaps influenced by continental drift, volcanoes, variations of the earth’s orbital parameters (ellipticity, spin-axis orientation, etc.), asteroid and comet impacts, variations in the sun’s output (not only the visible radiation but the amount of ultraviolet light, and the solar wind with its magnetic field), variations in cosmic rays leading to variations in cloud cover, and other causes.
The existence of the little ice age and the medieval warm period were an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel. The organization charged with producing scientific support for the climate change crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the past 1000 years with the celebrated “hockey stick” temperature record.
The first IPCC report, issued in 1990, showed both the medieval warm period and the little ice age very clearly. In the IPCC’s 2001 report was a graph that purported to show the earth’s mean temperature since the year 1000. A yet more extreme version of the hockey stick graph made the cover of the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization. To the surprise of everyone who knew about the strong evidence for the little ice age and the medieval climate optimum, the graph showed a nearly constant temperature from the year 1000 until about 150 years ago, when the temperature began to rise abruptly like the blade of a hockey stick. The inference was that this was due to the anthropogenic “pollutant” CO2.
This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign. There was no explanation of why both the medieval warm period and the little ice age, very clearly shown in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later.
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William, please, show us the faulty IPCC graphs, alongwith their explanations, please, please.
This is an excellent article. Thank you.
richard telford says:
May 21, 2011 at 5:08 am
“The MWP demonstrates that the earth’s climate is sensitive to changes in forcing, and would caution rational folk that perhaps we shouldn’t twist the dials too far.”
If the MWP would be an argument for the warmists, then the warmists would not have serially attempted to delete it from history and rename it to a “climate anomaly”; they would have tried to exaggerate it and renamed it to “Medieval Climate Catastrophe”. As this hasn’t happened, we can conclude that the warmists know very well that climate sensitivity to OTHER “forcings” exists but is intentionally covered up to give all the emphasis to CO2. Richard Telford, you have just violated this code of silence. I’m not sure whether your warmist friends will be glad about that.
Reading Dr. Happer would be a good place to start for the general population. Acording to a Yale survey, only about 7% of Americans know what the approximate concentration of CO2 is in the atmosphere.
http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/ClimateChangeKnowledge2010.pdf
Many more think that the ozone hole is a major factor in warming the planet. The warmists use this lack of knowledge to further their goals of brainwashing the public. What is surprising is the large percent of people who have become cynical about the scientific community. They don’t appear to trust authority figures very much. Perhaps the warmists overplayed their hand?
I believe that, if a person of reasonable intelligence was presented with unbiased facts about past and present climate, with no agendas hidden in the materials, he/she would conclude that CO2 is most likely not the principal driver of global temperatures. Unfortunately, unless people seek out more information, they will be bombarded with global warming propaganda several times a day. Some “documentary” type TV channels appear to have taken on the goal of blaming every negative event in nature on CO2.
Jim Cripwell says:
May 21, 2011 at 4:16 am
I cannot understand how the American Physical Society, and the Royal Society can continue to support the idea of CAGW…
==========
Our current administration appears to be coercing the news media into only providing one side of the story (not that said media is entirely unwilling to only provide that one side.)
Why not exert similar pressure on scientific organizations? “I need to inform you, Dr. Scientist, that there may be funding issues…”
Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics .
Are you sure? Is this a relative of Dame Hinge of Hinge and Bracket fame? You almost had me there! Interesting article all the same.
Good link re LIA to appreciate the full force of the cold – http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html
Of course the LIA has to be removed from the consciousness of those to be conned by the AGW claims or they’ll want to know why it’s a problem that the Earth has been warming since, and the MWP proves our current warming is not exceptional.
I hope Happer expands on his theme here. The technical arguments about the Hockey Schtick mean nothing to the mass of people, but information as to why it was created is in short supply, ditto about CO2 and other basics, and without this knowledge the finer points of the scam can’t be appreciated.
>>Jeff Mitchell says: May 21, 2011 at 5:56 am
Nice summary of the dispassionate nature of nature, and nobody could disagree. But try replacing ‘nature’ in your missive with ‘god’, and then see the sparks fly. But they are the same word, are they not?
.
Shhhhhh! Don’t say that.
And no runaway warming may I add.
There is no lower limit for human beings, but there is for human life. We would be perfectly healthy in a world with little or no atmospheric CO2—except that we would have nothing to eat and a few other minor inconveniences, because most plants stop growing if the levels drop much below 150 ppm.
Actually, humans require carbon dioxide for proper respiration. CO2 is a natural vasodilation agent that facilitates perfusion.
http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-vasodilation.php
In fact, hypocapnia (the state of reduced carbon dioxide in the blood) causes cerebral vasoconstriction, leading to cerebral hypoxia and causing transient dizziness, visual disturbances, anxiety, and even blackouts.
I think he forgot to cite himself.
Gaia’s way of growing more plants to feed the humans
There is evidence that California orange groves are about 30 percent more productive today than they were 150 years ago because of the increase of atmospheric CO2.
The trees, use of fertilizer, watering, temperature, etc. of course would not have changed
==============================
A well-known example is the medieval warming, about the year 1000, when the Vikings settled Greenland (when it was green) and wine was exported from England.
try facts rather than hearsay!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/
The earliest documentation that is better than anecdotal is from the Domesday Book (1087) – an early census that the new Norman king commissioned to assess his new English dominions, including the size of farms, population etc. Being relatively ‘frenchified’, the Normans (who had originally come from Viking stock) were quite keen on wine drinking (rather than mead or ale) and so made special note of existing vineyards and where the many new vines were being planted. Sources differ a little on how many vineyards are included in the book: Selley quotes Unwin (J. Wine Research, 1990 (subscription)) who records 46 vineyards across Southern England (42 unambiguous sites, 4 less direct), but other claims (unsourced) range up to 52. Lamb’s 1977 book has a few more from other various sources and anecdotally there are more still, and so clearly this is a minimum number.
Of the Domesday vineyards, all appear to lie below a line from Ely (Cambridgeshire) to Gloucestershire. Since the Book covers all of England up to the river Tees (north of Yorkshire), there is therefore reason to think that there weren’t many vineyards north of that line. Lamb reports two vineyards to the north (Lincoln and Leeds, Yorkshire) at some point between 1000 and 1300 AD
By 1977, there were 124 reasonable-sized vineyards in production – more than at any other time over the previous millennium. This resurgence was also unremarked upon by Lamb, who wrote in that same year that the English climate (the average of 1921-1950 to be precise) remained about a degree too cold for wine production. Thus the myth of the non-existant English wine industry was born and thrust headlong into the climate change debate…
Since 1977, a further 200 or so vineyards have opened (currently 400 and counting) and they cover a much more extensive area than the recorded medieval vineyards, extending out to Cornwall, and up to Lancashire and Yorkshire where the (currently) most northerly commercial vineyard sits. So with the sole exception of one ‘rather improbably’ located 12th Century Scottish vineyard (and strictly speaking that doesn’t count, it not being in England ‘n’ all…), English vineyards have almost certainly exceeded the extent of medieval cultivation. And I hear (from normally reliable sources) they are actually producing a pretty decent selection of white wines.
————————-
http://www.greenland-guide.gl/reg-south.htm
During the summer, South Greenland fully lives up to its Danish name, Green Land, as this is the most fertile part of the country. In fact most of the flora of Greenland grow in this particular region. The winter climate is relatively mild, and summer temperatures reaching 16-18°C are not uncommon. Because of these conditions, the economic life of this area is also very different from the rest of Greenland, with sheep farming and agriculture playing an important part. If you take a boat trip along the fjords you will see isolated sheep farms, some of which have paths and rough roads leading to them, while for others the only contact with the outside world is by boat or radio transmitter.
The sheep are rounded up in September, and some 20,000 lambs are taken on flat-bottomed boats to the slaughterhouse in Narsaq, one of the three sizeable large towns in South Greenland.
Many sheep farmers have built cabins near their farms, in which guests can stay for a day or two before they continue on foot to the next farm.
The abundant fertility of this region was also the reason why Eric the Red chose to live in South Greenland in around 985 AD, after he was outlawed from Iceland
==============================
During the “Younger Dryas” some 12,000 years ago, the earth very dramatically cooled and warmed by as much as 10 degrees Celsius in fifty years.
Not in the data I have seen:
7.6C in 95 years!!!! from GISP (greenland) 4.78C in 1032 years from EPICA (Antarctica)!!!!!!
==============================
Plausible candidates are spontaneous variations of the complicated fluid flow patterns in the oceans and atmosphere of the earth—perhaps influenced by continental drift, volcanoes, variations of the earth’s orbital parameters (ellipticity, spin-axis orientation, etc.), asteroid and comet impacts, variations in the sun’s output (not only the visible radiation but the amount of ultraviolet light, and the solar wind with its magnetic field), variations in cosmic rays leading to variations in cloud cover, and other causes.
Continetal drift over the 500M years would not have a “perhaps” effect it would be major
Milankovic cycles are well known and are one of the causes of massive changes in global climate – ice ages.
Care to say how magnetic field affects climate. UV is a small part of the solar out put a change in UV of a few % will have very very little effect.
==============================
The first IPCC report, issued in 1990, showed both the medieval warm period and the little ice age very clearly. In the IPCC’s 2001 report was a graph that purported to show the earth’s mean temperature since the year 1000. A yet more extreme version of the hockey stick graph made the cover of the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization. To the surprise of everyone who knew about the strong evidence for the little ice age and the medieval climate optimum, the graph showed a nearly constant temperature from the year 1000 until about 150 years ago, when the temperature began to rise abruptly like the blade of a hockey stick.
so an IPCC plot with no temperatue axis is “THE TRUTH” and everthing else by the IPCC is lies.
Great article – however, I would have liked to have seen more on correlation. Anyone looking at the correlation between CO2 and temperature on a time scale of 60 years or more, no cherry-picking allowed, would quickly note the lack of correlation. And, after all, lack of correlation IS lack of causation. Also, there was no mention of the Growth Constant e, which simply states that each incremental increase in temperature takes twice as much of an increase in CO2 as the previous increase by the same increment.
Formatting wise, the entry repeats — not that that’s a bad thing, it’s worth reading twice! But since there’s space available, why not include the entire article right here. It’s excellent reading.
William Happer Bracketts the Fogg. Next round – fire for effect.
CO2 does not cause global warming.CO2 has a poor heat coefficient. Water vapor, nitrogen, oxygen, and methane have much better coefficients. One would think that the temperature on Mars would be much warmer then it is considering that Mars has about 95% CO2 atmosphere if CO2 is to blame.
What DirkH said (May 21, 2011 at 8:51 am) rings true to me. If on balance the MWP could be used to promote (sell) CAGW, the CAGW establishment would not have tried to suppress it. The fact that some prominent CAGW team members did try to suppress the MWP means the CAGW establishment may not take too kindly to Mr. Telford.
Tom in Florida says:
May 21, 2011 at 5:29 am
R Gates is one who should stop sipping the kool aid long enough to read the article, the entire article.
____
Yes, I know R. Gates is often the fly in the ointment here at WUWT, and apparently it is believed by some that I never read scholarly articles and books about climate change, and haven’t spent decades studying the subject that includes every possible position on the subject…”warmist” and skeptic alike.
My biggest issue with William Happer’s basic points is that he try’s to compare CO2 levels of today with levels 50 million years ago as some indication that we’d be just fine with higher levels, because life flourished under such conditions. Life is a broad category, and I would think that most of of would not just be concerned with what levels “life” flourished under, but rather, the conditions that human life, and more specifically, civilization flourished under. Over the past 800,000 years CO2 levels have been lower than we are seeing now. During this period (for more relevant than 50 million years ago) we saw homo sapiens emerge while CO2 levels remained in a range of 150 to 280 ppm. William Happer is making a huge leap into completely unfounded territory to suggest that CO2 levels much higher than we even have to day would be good for human life and existence. If you doubt this, I would point out the fact that the cultivated grain crops of the world, which are the backbone of our food supply, did not exist 50 Million years ago, and their emergence only came about fairly recently (in the past tens of thousands of years), during the period that CO2 levels remained in a that range between 150 and 280 ppm. During the period of earth’s history when CO2 levels were 1,000 ppm or higher, the wonderful grain crops that we all depend on would have never been possible, for you’d never see acres and acres of wheat, barley, corn, etc. growing in steamy hot jungles.
It is certain that that the grain plants of the earth represent the very foundation of our civilization, and indeed, civilization came forth when farming and agriculture arose. It is also true that some plants do thrive under higher CO2 levels, but the raw ppm of CO2 and it’s direct affect on the growth of plants is not the only factor that must be looked at. We know that the hydrological cycle is greatly dependent on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This fact, completely overlooked by William Happer, is one of the keys to the effects of higher CO2 levels on our climate, and thus, to the individual weather events that taken as a whole over the longer term, add up to make that climate. Thus, one inescapable fact of higher CO2 levels is an acceleration of the hydrological cycle. This is the earth’s nature negative feedback process that keeps CO2 levels in that range we’ve seen over the past 800,000 years. Increase CO2 levels and you increase the existence of heavy downpours in areas prone to rain, and also increase the persistence of drought in areas prone to drought. Neither of these are conducive to growing the large acreage of grains upon which the world’s civilization depend.
I am curious if William Happer has studied the connection between CO2 levels and the hydrological cycle. If he had, and done so in an honest and thorough way, I wouldn’t think he’d be so keen on thinking that we could see CO2 levels at 1,000 ppm without extremely negative effects on the large scale agriculture around the world, and those negative effects would not necessarily come as a result of the actual raw ppm of CO2, but rather the disruptive climate effects and alterations in the hydrological cycle caused by these higher CO2 levels. No matter how much the wheat plant may or may not like higher CO2 levels, it is hard to grow it when the fields are flooded or dry as a bone.
The “problem” of greenhouse gas emissions should be addressed to the source – the greenhouse.
Until some inventive person conceives a device to attach to a greenhouse that will convert greenhouse gas emissions to atmospheric gases, the problem of greenhouse gas emissions can never be solved.
However, the UN/IPCC can solve this problem by international treaty banning all greenhouses and assessing crippling fines to treaty violators.
In the meantime, we can protect against the dangers of greenhouse emissions by acquiring factual information on the science surrounding the controversy by referring to the common sense exposition of scientific facts by Professor Happer:
Professor denies global warming theory
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/01/12/22506/print/
“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, said in an interview. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”
and by referencing the comprehensive work of The Galileo Movement: http://www.galileomovement.com.au/galileo_movement.php
Katherine says:
May 21, 2011 at 9:41 am
There is no lower limit for human beings, but there is for human life. We would be perfectly healthy in a world with little or no atmospheric CO2—except that we would have nothing to eat and a few other minor inconveniences, because most plants stop growing if the levels drop much below 150 ppm.
Actually, humans require carbon dioxide for proper respiration. CO2 is a natural vasodilation agent that facilitates perfusion.
http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-vasodilation.php
In fact, hypocapnia (the state of reduced carbon dioxide in the blood) causes cerebral vasoconstriction, leading to cerebral hypoxia and causing transient dizziness, visual disturbances, anxiety, and even blackouts.
_____
As I’ve pointed out numerous times here on WUWT…the troposphere, much like the human body, likes to see CO2 in a RANGE, not too high, and not too low. Likewise, the human body, like the planet, have natural negative feedback responses to keep CO2 in a range. In both cases, if those natural feedback processes are overwhelmed by a large influx of CO2, some interesting (and usually rather nasty) effects begin to occur.
“All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison….” Paracelsus (1493-1541)
walt man says:
“so an IPCC plot with no temperatue axis is “THE TRUTH” and everthing else by the IPCC is lies.”
You’re pretty close. The 1st Assessment Report was generally acceptable science. But every subsequent IPCC report has gotten progressively less honest. At this point it is simply self-serving propaganda written by alarmists and the WWF, with no honest skeptical scientists permitted to author.
Next, R.B. Alley shows the abrupt and extreme temperature changes just prior to the Holocene.
Finally, current temperatures and trends are nothing unusual, and even NOAA shows clearly that the MWP existed [click in chart to embiggen]. And the ice core records from both hemispheres show close correlation, indicating that the MWP and similar events were global.
Fine article by Dr. Happer. Great to see an esteemed physicist talking facts and evidence, instead of parroting the always-inaccurate computer model predictions.
………carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants……
Richard Feynman on CO2 in the environment. CO2 is a natural part of life.
Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate atmospheric CO2 as a “pollutant.”
—————————————————————————————–
“Greenhouse gases are pollution.”
–Lisa Jackson
current EPA head
31 second video where the quote came from:
H2O is a greenhouse gas. Is H2O pollution?
The current rate of burning fossil fuels adds about 2 ppm per year to the atmosphere, so that getting from the current level to 1000 ppm would take about 300 years
That would assume all factors in the earth stay the same as they are now. If there is cooling in the earth CO2 will sink into the oceans. That would throw the math of the statement off.